Fail Whale
#99ccee
A blue that is nearly neutral — the hue shows only against a true grey. It is very light — it works as a page background, not as text.
Hex
#99ccee
RGB
153, 204, 238
OKLCh
82.1% 0.072 238.0°
CIELAB (D50)
79.4, -11.0, -22.5
What is true of this colour, and of no other
- 3 other named colours sit within ΔE00 2 of it.
- It uses 70% of the chroma sRGB can show at this lightness and hue.
- As text on white it measures APCA Lc 30.9; on black, Lc -71.9. The sign is the polarity, which the WCAG ratio discards.
- Built into an eleven-step scale, 10 of the 10 adjacent pairs stay ΔE00 2 apart — see the ramp.
- protanopia and deuteranopia and tritanopia shift it by ΔE00 16.7 and 15.9 and 14.0 — no red cone.
Text on this colour
White text
1.72:1 — fails AA
Black text
12.23:1 — passes AA
Black text is the better of the two at12.23:1. That is enough for body text.
As text on white, it needs to change
#4b7c9b is the nearest colour of the same hue that passes AA on white, at 4.50:1. Only the lightness moved.
The same colour, with one cone missing
As you see it
#99ccee
protanopia
#c7c7ee · ΔE00 16.7
deuteranopia
#bfbfef · ΔE00 15.9
tritanopia
#b5b5ff · ΔE00 14.0
The twelve nearest named colours
Ranked by CIEDE2000 — perceptual distance, not hex arithmetic. The closest isHonolulu at ΔE00 1.059: between 1 and 2 — a trained eye spots it when the two touch; nobody spots it across a room. What the numbers mean.
- HonoluluΔE00 1.059 · #96cbf1
- Pacific OceanΔE00 1.275 · #92cbf1
- Mediterranean CharmΔE00 1.686 · #a1cfec
- Light Cornflower BlueΔE00 2.004 · #93ccea
- SailΔE00 2.156 · #a5ceec
- Windsor WayΔE00 2.248 · #9fc9e4
- Sonic SkyΔE00 2.381 · #a0d1ec
- Marzena DreamΔE00 2.4 · #a6d0ec
- Long Island SoundΔE00 2.546 · #95d0fc
- Pale CeruleanΔE00 2.579 · #9bc4e2
- SongbirdΔE00 2.638 · #a3d1eb
- CieloΔE00 2.648 · #a5cee8
12 of these have no page of their own: pages exist for the 4,961 colours the dataset marks as good names.